By the end of “Our Town” at the Des Moines Social Club’s new theater, everybody in the room is sitting in a circle of chairs. The actors sit as ghosts in an imaginary graveyard, staring out at the audience. And the audience stares back, sniffling a little and reaching for wadded-up Kleenex in their coat pockets.

The fourth-wall boundaries by this point are pretty blurry.

It’s easy to think of Thornton Wilder’s play as a moldy oldie, a chestnut best suited for the high-school stage. But in this rare professional staging, which Repertory Theater of Iowa presents through Feb. 23, you get a sense of the depth and power that won the script a 1938 Pulitzer Prize and a permanent place on the shelf of American classics. The story is more poignant than you might remember.

In the current incarnation, director Brad Dell paints the first two acts in a Rockwellian glow, where everything in tiny Grover’s Corners, N.H., feels just right. The paperboy and milkman make their rounds. The train from Boston whistles right on time. (Josh Jepson arranged the sound effects and gentle piano interludes.)

Doc Gibbs (Mark Gruber) and his wife (Kerry Skram) fuss over their kids, George and Rebecca (Ethan Peterson, Glori Dei Fillipone), while the same scene plays out next door at the home of the newspaper editor, Mr. Webb (John Earl Robinson), his wife (Jami Bassman), and their two kids, Emily and little Wally (Katy Merriman, Ben Jurgens).

In the spare set (by designer Jay Jagim), the neighboring families share a simple staircase amid an artful pile of antiques. It’s just ordinary clutter — a hutch, a phonograph — but it helps take the story back to the early 1900s. (Kelly Marie Schaefer’s folksy costumes help, too.)

Spouses bicker about money. Church ladies gossip about the town drunk. Teenagers suffer the torment of young love — George and Emily’s soda-fountain date is perfectly awkward — but for the most part, these are happy people in a happy place.

So all is well, until it isn’t.

The wise, rangy old narrator (the expert Richard Richards) steers the story into darker territory in the third act. So even if you know what comes next — the death of one of the young leads — you can’t dodge its emotional wallop. You can’t avoid it.

But why would you? As one of the new ghosts laments, “It goes so fast. We don’t have time to look at one another.”